A Feast for Vultures

Across Africa's broad chest, from Senegal to Ethiopia, the worst drought of the century continues to cut a 4,000-mile swath of devastation. After six years of light rainfall, nearly one-third of the 51 million people who live in this band from the Atlantic to the Red Sea are threatened by starvation. Not even a good rainfall this season can end the tragedy, so wasted is the land and so slight the prospect of a bountiful harvest. Worst hit are Ethiopia and the six nations of the arid Sahel (Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Upper Volta, Niger and Chad).

Sahel's principal rivers, the Senegal and the Niger, have fallen to their lowest levels since the start of the century. Lake Chad has evaporated to one-third its normal size and has actually separated into four parts. The fishing village of Bol, once a lakeside settlement, today looks out on a vast wasteland of parched scrubgrass stretching 18 miles to the water. The lake's fish catch has been halved, creating a protein deficiency that aggravates an already short supply of grains. In northern Chad, nomads are eating boiled tree bark and roots.

Visitors to the area, like U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, are visibly shaken by what they see: emaciated adults, children with distended bellies, filthy refugee camps where overcrowding has triggered epidemics of measles, influenza and cholera. Reports TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs, who has logged 7,000 miles touring the drought area: "There are experts with many years' experience in the Sahel who see no end in sight to the cycle of drought, famine and death. The Sahel's Tuareg nomads have a saying, 'When the camel collapses, the game is over.' For them, now clustered in refugee camps and having seen their camels die of starvation, the game is all but over."

Starving Lions. The drought seems to be moving southward. The usually lush tropical forests of the northern Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo and Dahomey have received so little rain that their coffee and cocoa crops are far below normal. Nigeria's peanut harvest has been cut by two-thirds. Animals as well as people are suffering. More than 3,000 elephants, lions, giraffes and buffaloes have starved to death in Cameroon's Waza National Park.

In Ethiopia, famine in Welo and Tigre provinces left nearly 100,000 dead last year; some people were so weakened that when a rainstorm struck Dese, the capital of Welo, they drowned in a couple of inches of water, unable to raise their heads from the gutter. Now the drought is expanding into other areas. In Harar province's Danakil Desert, the nomadic tribesmen are in danger of dying out as a race. Carcasses of their cattle, sheep, goats and camels litter the desert; the surviving animals are so scrawny that cows, once worth $60 in the marketplace, now go for $3. "Everywhere there are Danakil graves," cabled Griggs, "small mounds covered with rocks to prevent hungry hyenas from digging up and devouring the bodies. Some Danakil dead have been found with dirt in their stomachs, evidence that they have tried to lick the ground for moisture. Only the vultures are fat."

Almost daily the Ethiopian government reports new pockets of drought and famine. Shoa province was thought to be receiving sufficient rain. Yet a recent government study found that nearly 12,000 Shoans have died of starvation. Early this year, a Norwegian-church relief team came upon a small settlement in Sidamo province that was deserted except for 62 rotting corpses, all victims of famine.

The Ethiopian government expects that it will have to provide emergency relief for 4 million of its 26 million people. Even the start of the spring rains may do more harm than good. In parched Harar province, four days of torrential downpours last month swelled the Awash River to 14 ft. above its normal level, flooding thousands of huts, killing dozens of peasants, and washing away tons of the topsoil that the area needs if it is ever to recover.

Last year a massive international relief effort, coordinated by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, mobilized 471,000 tons of grain and $130 million to keep most of Africa's famine victims alive. But, says an FAO official in Niamey, capital of Niger, "1974 is going to make 1973 look like the horn of plenty," and even more will be required. Soliciting aid from such donors as the U.S. and the European Economic Community and transporting it to Africa are only part of the problem. Incompetence, corruption and greed prevent much of the aid from moving quickly to the interior where it is most needed. In Mali, instead of distributing relief goods at no cost, some officials sold the grain to merchants, who then resold it at an enormous profit to their starving countrymen. In Ethiopia, truckers have balked at transporting aid, preferring to haul other goods for higher rates.

Malthusian Future. The region's backwardness and inaccessibility also impede distribution. A third of Ethiopia's people live more than 20 miles from a road or rail track; once the rains begin, the few roads that do exist in Ethiopia and the Sahel will likely turn to mud. Relief authorities are thus rushing to preposition aid before the rains start. But the grain, piled uncovered, is easy prey for thieves, locusts, bush rats and the quelea quelea birds, which can consume up to twice their weight in food daily. If the leaders of the relief agencies try to airlift the emergency supplies, as they did very effectively last year, they will find that the 500% jump in the price of airplane fuel in Africa may make the cost prohibitive.

Emergency relief may buy time for Ethiopia, enabling its new government to make the investments necessary to avoid future famines. The prognosis for the Sahel, however, is much worse. Even though the leaders of the six nations last autumn formed a committee that prepared a $700 million list of 126 development projects, including hydroelectric dams, deep wells and reforestation programs, the Sahel's chances of survival are uncertain. In the past six years the Sahara has crept continually southward, progressing as much as 100 miles in some places. If this is the result of a basic change in weather patterns, then, according to a British meteorologist, "all mankind's efforts to halt the desert encroachment of the Sahel will be futile."

The region's six nations, therefore, may be confronting a bleak Malthusian future in which the most basic needs of their populations will fatally outstrip the productive potential of the land. A U.S. intelligence analyst speculates, "We don't know if the Sahel countries will even be here in ten years."

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